Stress cells do not involve compositional differences, but involve regions with stress gradients such as dislocations, grain boundaries, and highly stressed areas that become prone to corrosion. One example is the chemical etching of as — polished surface of a metallographic sample. The grain boundaries being the stressed regions act as anodes and get attacked by the etchant preferentially.

Another example would be a cold bent rod when submerged in water gets attacked more at the bent region, which acts an anode because of the high residual stress present in it. There are corrosion mechanisms (stress corrosion cracking (SCC) and corrosion fatigue) that are aided by the presence of stress.